Okay, Josh, I've been fact checking in my own account and with YouTubers like Roberto Blake and Nick Nimmin.
We will NOT LOSE the ability to do Custom Thumbnails or have longer videos. PHEW! Eh!
I'm still wondering about the ability to schedule videos, but I had that ability before I ever started to monetize, so that should be fine too.
As long as you verified your account, through the Account tab (I think that's where it is), you won't lose those features.
What you lose is monetization and the ability to have external links in your end cards. That's important to note, BUT you can still link to anything in the description. So it's not AS bad as I feared.
What sucks is this new threshhold, but it actually is propotional. I looked at my analytics and I am 1/3 of the way to 1K subs, and my watch time in hours is 1/3 to 4K hrs. So 4K hrs for 1K subs is doable. It just sucks that I don't have that opportunity to monetize, since my channel is small and grows slowly.
But it's important to note what we feared we might lose that we will not be losing after all.